According to its lead designer, Counter Strike: Global Offensive won’t be as easy on you as its competitors are.
Valve, or at least the part of it responsible for Global Offensive, has a problem with modern FPS games. According to lead designer Ido Magal, many of them are too quick to “pander” to players who don’t want to improve their skills to progress. Apparently, things will be a little different in Global Offensive.
In an interview with Official Xbox Magazine, Magal said that, “A lot of shooters, instead of giving people encouragement to improve, will just pander to them never being better. And I kind of appreciate that but at the same time it can be demeaning to people who want to get better.”
In line with this commitment to incentivizing improvement, the game won’t feature some of the more modern features that many gamers have come to expect from FPS experiences. First and foremost, Call of Duty-style ironsights are out. “We don’t say, Well we need iron sights because everyone else has iron sights,” Magal continued. “If they could figure out a way for them to make sense, we’d add them, but right now we think iron sights just make people move slower because they’ll be afraid to put their gun down.”
Global Offensive will still include a variety of difficulties for players to choose from; “Casual” mode will make your life easier by deactivating the in-game currency system used to buy weapons and upgrades, while two modder-created hardcore modes will ramp up the difficulty for anyone who wants life to be a little harder. What this “encouragement to improve” will entail remains to be seen; while there must be gamers who wouldn’t mind this game becoming the FPS Dark Souls, this development won’t be welcomed by those who enjoy the odd quick, pandering spell of gameplay before they leave the house.
Counter Strike: Global Offensive will be released in 2012.
Source: Official Xbox Magazine
